Our Industry Leading Consumer Focus

Across all our businesses, we seek to treat each and every consumer fairly. All of our employees take great pride in our consumer-centric approach to helping resolve past-due debt obligations, which empowers the consumer to gain financial well-being. By listening to and understanding each individual situation, we are able to offer our consumers affordable and sustainable payment solutions, individualized to meet their needs.

In the U.S., we codified our consumer commitment by creating the industry’s first Consumer Bill of Rights. In it, we commit to cease or suspend collections where consumers demonstrate a hardship, provide a credit reporting grace period, stop reporting negative credit information after two years (instead of the seven-year industry standard), do not collect from active duty military, and do not charge our consumers any fees or pre-judgment interest on their debt balances domestically. Internationally, customer service, regulatory compliance and a strong values-driven ethical culture are at the heart of the business.

Encore Capital Group has three primary business units

Our Focus & Business Strengths

Through our subsidiaries and affiliates, we purchase portfolios of defaulted receivables from financial service providers including banks, credit unions, consumer finance companies, and commercial retailers. After purchasing defaulted debt, we partner with individuals as they repay their obligations and work toward financial recovery. We also provide debt servicing for consumer and business-to-business accounts as well as portfolio management services to credit originators for non-performing loans.

Our long-term success and continued growth comes as a result of our competitive advantage in five key areas:

Analytic Strength

We leverage an industry-leading consumer database, in-house statisticians, business analysts, and software programmers to continually enhance proprietary behavioral and valuation models, custom software applications, and other business tools that guide our portfolio purchases and collection strategies.

Strong Capital Stewardship

We focus on raising and deploying capital prudently to maximize our return on invested capital. Our operational scale and geographic diversification enable us to adjust to market trends and deploy capital to maximize risk-adjusted returns.

Consumer Intelligence

At the core of our analytic approach is a focus on characterizing our consumers’ willingness and ability to repay their financial obligations using tools and methods from statistics, psychology, economics, and management science across our business.

Principled Intent

We are committed to dialogue that is honorable and constructive and hope to play an important and positive role in financial recovery across all accounts. We work to align our interests, and those of the financial institutions from which we purchase portfolios, with the interests of consumers and government agencies seeking to protect consumer rights.

Operational Scale and Cost Efficiency

We are a market leader in portfolio purchasing and recovery in the United States and one of the largest credit management services providers in Europe. This operational scale combined with cost efficiency stemming from operations in India and Costa Rica is central to our collection and purchasing strategies.